Transcript Linguistic Preliminaries Part II: Intro to Morphosyntax

LINGUISTIC
PRELIMINARIES PART II:
INTRO TO MORPHOSYNTAX
Linguistics 187 / Cultural Anthropology 187 / English 187 / ICS 151C
Variety in Language: English in the United States
Duke University
Erin Callahan-Price
Spring 2011
Announcements 1/31/2011
• Will hand back Phonetics Exercises at end of class; you did good!
• Announcements section on blog
• Poll
• Attendance
• Updated Syllabus
• Presentations sign up: I’ll pass around a sheet Monday 2/7 in class;
•
•
•
•
be ready to sign up individually or in partners.
Blog Post 2: Grade is out of 10; average of 2 LF exercises
Blog Post 3: Will be due this Sunday; will display/discuss topic at end
of class
Office hours start Wednesday; watch for email for location
Today: In-class exercises, count as part II of Blog #2 grade
SECTION I
Morphology: The Structure of Words (Finegan 2004: 39)
LF 5.1
Morphosyntax: Sample Scenarios
• Your 3-year old niece asks you if you “maked” her
birthday cake yet, as well as if you “speaked” with your
friends and “telled” them about it. How would you explain
why she uses the patterns she does?
• Can you guess the “top ten” words used most often in
printed English? Can you hypothesize a reason for their
high frequency?
• Why, in some English dialects, can we say “fan-freaking-
tastic” but not “fanta-freaking-stic” (or even fantasfreaking-tic)?
The Easy Part
• The principles behind lexicon and morphology of your
language tend more readily accessible, so we’ll spend less
time here.*
• What does it mean to know a word?
• The sounds and their sequencing (phonetic, phonological
information)
• Its meaning (semantic information)
• How related words, like the plural (for nouns) and past tense (for
verbs) are formed (morphological information)
• Its category (e.g. noun/verb/adjective) and how to use it in a sentence
(syntactic information)
The Easy Part
“THE SPLIT ORANGE” BY ANTHONY BRIDGE POCHADES
• THERE ARE NO DUMB QUESTIONS
• Can the words girl, ask, tall, uncle, and orange be divided into
smaller meaningful units?
• Like oh, say, o + range?
Definitions
• However: many words do have more than one meaningful part. Like
grand + mother, which is relatively transparent.
• The smallest meaningful units in a word are called morphemes.
• Thus: truly has two morphemes: true + ly.
• CAUTION: Just as you learned not to treat (transcribed)
sounds and their respective spellings the same
way, be careful not to fall into the trap of
equating morphemes with syllable:
-harvest, grammar, river, Connecticut (= 1 morpheme)
-kissed
(=
KISS
+ ‘PAST
TENSE’)
Characteristics of Morphemes
• They can be free or bound
• true, mother, orange vs. –un, tele-, -ness, and –er
• Certain bound morphemes can change the category of the
word to which they are attached.
Doubtful (NOUN  ADJ)
Establishment (VERB NOUN)
Darken (ADJ VERB)
Frighten (NOUN  VERB)
Teacher (VERB NOUN)
• This is one easy way to know that these morphemes are
derivational morphemes
Characteristics of Morphemes, cont.
• Another type of bound morpheme is illustrated in the words
cats, collected, and sleeps
• These inflectional morphemes change the form of a word
but not its lexical category or central meaning.
• Inflectional morphemes, instead, create variant forms of a word to
conform to different roles in a sentence*.
• On nouns and pronouns, inflectional pronouns serve to mark semantic
notions like number and grammatical categories such as gender and
case.
• On verbs, they can mark such things as tense or number, while, on
adjectives they can indicate degree.
* Here we start to see some “bridges” between morphology and syntax
Examples: English inflectional affixes
Cats (CAT + PLURAL)
Collected (COLLECT + PAST )
Sleeps (SLEEP + 3RD SG. PRESENT)
In case you were wondering:
English doesn’t have a lot of these.
• You’ll notice we don’t have many inflectional affixes… how do
we make up for it? Some strategies:
I. Homophony:
• PAST marker vs. PAST PARTICIPLE forms (i.e. that are identical):
• I marked/have marked
• I closed/have closed
• I emailed/have emailed (neologisms get regular endings)
• What stays the same (i.e. “resists” regularization) is often a L’s “core vocabulary” (was/been,
saw/see, ate/eaten, tell/told…). These forms are:
1. learned last in the language acquisition process because they are irregular
2. often “regularized” in vernacular
I seen a horse
I’ve ate a lot of fish in my life.
• II. Word order:
• She [NOM] hit him [ACC] (correctly marked for case– it’s not “Her hit he.”)
• Alice hit Bill vs. Bill hit Alice (MEANING CHANGE: must pay attention to word order since
NOT marked for case)
Side Note:
Bound Roots– a thorn in our morphological sides.
• “Bound roots” like the riv- in river (or the “-ceive” in “conceive”) might have once been
free in the history of English (and in fact still are in closely related langs; cf Fr. Rive
Gauche). Now, due to language change, they don’t have the same kind of
(morphological) autonomy.
• So how many morphemes does river have? The answer depends on YOU!
(remember back to our definition of morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in a
language.)
• In the case of, river, you must first (crucially) ask yourself if the bound root has an
independent meaning for YOU. Does the “word” riv mean anything to you (i.e. without
the suffix –er)? Probably not. In this case, “river” would be coded in your mind as a
single morpheme.
• The situation might be a little different for, say, –ceive (as conceive). First of all, maybe
you have a fuzzy idea of some kind of “core” meaning for this root…. Something like,
oh, “get or see meaning/information” (that’s my best stab/intuition). That’s because we
have a lot of –ceiv-y type words hanging out in the lexicon of English.
Bound Roots, cont.
• When you check to see if –ceive appears in other words,
does it preserve this meaning (i.e. consistently)? (Why
yes: in per-ceive, de-ceive, re-ceive…)
• If you find the root in closely related Ls [that you know]
(bound roots usually come from Latin), you have even
more evidence that it’s a bound root coded as such in
your mind.
• So, if rece(voir/bir) (Fr./Sp. “to receive”) occurs to you
from your 11th grade French class, you have lots of
material for your argument that the word is indeed built of
2 morphemes in your mind.
Finite Set of English Inflectional Affixes
You can memorize them!
• These are affixes which sound alike but have a different meaning (different
grammatical shape)
• Another example is –er
• Marks comparative degree on adjectives/adverbs (sweet, sweet +er)
• Derive an agent noun from a verb (dive  diver)
Flow Chart
In-class practice with a partner
• Get out LF 5.2
• p. 150: do exs. 1 & 3
• In ex. 1, just tell whether it’s DERIVATIONAL vs. INFLECTIONAL and
BOUND vs. FREE (don’t worry about content/function for now).
• for the …tell the meaning of function of each suffix part, just use your
own words; don’t worry about fancy terminology
• p. 151: do ex. 5
• You and your partner only have to turn in one paper; just make
sure both names are on it.
Please make sure your and your partner’s first and last names are
on your paper and turn it in after class.
Homework: Blog Post #3
• The study of linguistics can be seen as an
exercise in learning not to take language for
granted.
• In the last few weeks, my goal was for you to
begin to be able to “see under the hood” of the
sounds and words we produce (and understand)
effortlessly every day.
• The “reading” you will be responding to is the LF
readings as well as the text of the class lectures.
Instructions
In blog post #3, you will address the following topic:
What continuous themes do you observe in the content we’ve covered so
far (Universals/Design Features, Phonetics, Morphosyntax)?
• Here you can go wild according to your own background/field of study.
Use what you know to connect with what you’ve learned.
• The “themes”(/connecting strands, unifying devices, recurrent
models, resonating ideas) may be structural, analogical,
philosophical, biological, metaphorical, allegorical,
mythical, mathematical, social, logical, spatial… use the
“register” you can write most authoritatively in.
• Some questions to get you brainstorming:
•
•
•
Are there other social/biological/allegorical, etc. systems which function in the same way
language does? Do we draw on similar metaphors in describing these systems?
What assumptions are necessary for our “model” of language not to ‘fall apart’ (e.g.
analytically, empirically, rhetorically)?
Could the resonant models/themes/”thought styles” you identify here “mis-fire” or
malfunction at any point to make the model inconsistent with the (socio)linguistic
realities (data) you observe in the “real world”?
Reminders
• Post as “NEW POST” on the front page
• Attach category blog3 (already in list) plus one more
category you pick/create
• You will be graded exactly according to the response
rubric (posted under “Assignments”)
• REMINDERS: Use linguistic terms! Always re-read your sentences to ask
yourself “Can I be more specific? Can I give examples?”
• Responses should be ~500 words
• Responses should be technically correct (punctuation, spelling, sentence
structure). PROOFREAD.
• No citations necessary unless you refer to a text outside of class lectures
and LF readings.
SECTION II
Syntax, proper: The Structure and Function of Phrases &
Sentences (Finegan 2004: 146-154)
LFs 6.1-6.2
What is Syntax?
• Let’s think back to the pipe
organ… and do an experiment.
• Listen to the following sound.
• Is it recognizable as “music”?
• What gives it “order” vs. “disorder”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbG1sOjizPU
What is Syntax, cont.
Let’s think back to the pipe
organ… and do an experiment.
Listen to the following sound.
Is it recognizable as “music”?
What gives it “order” vs.
“disorder”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFis0Jj8YK4
What Do YOU think?
The Lesson?
Framing Questions for a Study of Syntax
In this chapter we ask the
question “What determines whether
a string of words in a language
is a sentence or simply a string
of unrelated words”?
• What do we mean by ‘unrelated’? That’s sort of the key. If we knew the
answer to that, it’d be the end of the field of syntax.
• But seriously: a sentence isn’t just an arbitrary list of words, like the list of
your names on my attendance sheet….
• And music– at least the way we conceive of Modern, Western, tonal, etc. etc.
music– isn’t just an arbitrary string of sounds.
• As such, a sentence of any human language is a sequence of particular
kinds of words in particular kinds of orderings which produce particular
kinds of meanings.
Rules for Meaning(s):
What makes sentences/major-key sonatas “well-formed”?
.
• But– what are the rules for producing the meanings we
want to produce with the sentences of our language?
• In other words… what were the rules that make us be
able to put Brahms or Mozart on our ipod to go to sleep at
night, and associate the experimental music (at best) with
an avant-garde horror movie?
The Nuts and Bolts (6.1):
What You Need to Know
• The order of word in a sentence or phrase is connected to
its meaning: Bill hit Alice vs. Alice hit Bill
• Not every linear ordering of words expresses a meaning:
a. *Collar on is the dog the b. *Dog on the is collar the.
• We call orders that form possible sentences of a language
“grammatical” (vis a vis prescriptive meaning).
• Impossible sentences because words are in the wrong
order with respect to each other are “ungrammatical.”
Nuts and Bolts cont.: Phrase Structure (6.4)
What You Need to Know
• In English, main categories are N, V, Adj, Prep, Adv. These
lexical categories (built around a structural “head”) can be built
with different combinations of ingredients:
Book the funny book on the table
Phrase structure rule: NP (DET) (ADJ) N (PP)
• Phrase structure trees represent phrase structure rules in “3D”
(in other words, not just order of categories but the relatedness
of the categories to each other)
• Help us visualize structure of the sentence
• “Nodes” are categories
• Can be read “vertically” as well as “horizontally”
Pretty Basic Phrase Structure Tree:
Phrase Structure Rules Represented Graphically
Phrase Structure Trees Resolve
Structural Ambiguity
Vs.
Vs.
Another experiment: Wernicke’s Aphasiac
• Leaving pipe organs behind… let’s think about the question in
another mode. What do people who have syntax sound like?
www.physiology.wisc.edu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhYN7NTIKU
www.physiology.wisc.edu
Broca’s Aphasiac
• What do people who don’t have syntax sound like?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM
www.physiology.wisc.educ
Complementary Disordering?
• Broca’s Aphasia:
• Wernicke’s Aphasia
• Semantically-ready; grammar-
• Grammar-ready; semantically-
deficient
• “an inability to plan the motor
sequences used in speech of
sign… [but also] display
telegraphic speech, or speech
without inflections and function
words such as to or the…”
• “Comprehension … is not too
much of a problem, although they
may have some difficulty
matching the correct semantic
interpretation to the syntactic
order of sentences.
deficient
• receptive disorder
• Semantically incoherent speech
which is usually
syntactically/grammatically fluent
• Lexical retrieval messed up
• The lion was killed by the tiger as The
tiger was killed by the lion
• Table: “chair”
• Clip: “plick”
• Ceiling: “leasing”
• Ankle: “ankley, no
mankle, no kankle” (Pinker
1994: 311)
….but! Syntactic framework (“slots”
for those word-like things) remains
mostly intact
Defining Syntax:
Another Polemical Question…
1957
~1993
~2010
Core Principles
Chomsky 1957, p. 19